cam2pc version 3.0
user guide

I. Installation

A. Installing cam2pc

There are no special requirements to install cam2pc. All Windows platforms are supported though the USB options are only supported on USB-compatible operating systems (Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP).

Follow the simple steps of the installation. By default cam2pc will be installed in your Program Files. If you want to start using cam2pc right now then click OK when prompted to launch the tray icon.

When upgrading from a previous version, it may be needed to reboot your computer for the shell extension (cam2pc entries in the contextual menu of folders in Explorer) to be installed.

It is highly recommended to switch your display to a 32-bit display mode (also called “Millions of colors”). If this is not the case when you first run cam2pc, the program will tell you do so. Viewing images taken with a digital camera in any other mode does not produce the best quality. Launch the Display Control Panel from the Start Menu and go to the Settings tab. There you should be able to choose 32-bit in the Colors combo box.

B. Associating your image files with cam2pc

cam2pc can be used to display your images (JPEG, TIFF, PNG and BMP files as of version 3.0) in a full-screen viewer. The simpler way is to associate cam2pc with those image types.

Right-click on the tray icon and choose Options. Then go to the Shell Integration section. Click the Select All button or select the types you want to display in cam2pc then click OK.

From now on, double clicking an image file in the Explorer will launch cam2pc.

Windows XP treats images in a particular way. If you associate files with cam2pc, you won't be able to access the default image viewer of Windows XP (which offers printing capability for instance) except for BMP files where cam2pc can't take over the default association. So if you want to read BMP files in cam2pc you'll have to select the Open With... item in the Explorer contextual menu of a BMP file, then select cam2pc in the list of applications and check the "Always use..." box. If you still want to be able to use the default XP image viewer, then do not associate image files with cam2pc and use the Open With... item when you want to open an image with cam2pc. I know this is a bit tricky but Windows XP behaves quite strangely on this point...

C. Explorer contextual menu

cam2pc can also be configured to display additional entries in the contextual menu that appears when you right-click on a folder in Explorer. The menu can be used to browse the contents of a folder or to transfer images from that folder.

Go to the Shell Integration section of the Options dialog and click the “Integrate cam2pc into Explorer” checkbox. You can also activate cascaded menus and icons in the menus by clicking the appropriate check boxes.

D. Uninstallation

Uninstalling cam2pc is as straightforward as installing it. Select the “Uninstall cam2pc” entry in Start Menu > Programs > cam2pc or run the “Add/Remove Programs” Control Panel.

If you associated image files with cam2pc, you should break the association in cam2pc prior to uninstalling it. Doing this in cam2pc sets back the file associations to their previous state which the uninstaller does not do.

II. Transferring Images

A. Setting up your camera

Before cam2pc can download pictures from your camera you must setup your camera type. The default is to support cameras that appear as removable drives which are assigned a letter (e.g. F:\) in Explorer.

For this type of camera (called USB Auto-connect), automatic plug-in detection is supported: as soon as you plug your camera, cam2pc will display the Download dialog (if the tray icon is running). To differentiate your camera from other removable devices, cam2pc will look for a particular folder on the device. The default value (DCIM) should work for all the standard cameras but you can always change this value in the Camera tab of the Options dialog. For this type of camera you can also automatically unplug it at the end of the file transfer. Check the "Unplug USB..." option and click the Setup button next to it. Make sure your camera is plugged in and switched on while doing this. A window with the list of removable USB device appears. Select the one that matches your camera (my Olympus camera appears as "USB Mass Storage Device @ C-200Z/D-510Z" while a friend's Fujifilm appears as "USB Mass Storage Device @ USB Mass Storage Device") and press OK.

Since version 2.0, cam2pc supports camera based on the Sierra Imaging chipset. This includes:

• Agfa: ePhoto line of cameras.
• Epson: PhotoPC (at least 500, 550, 600, 750Z).
• Sanyo: VPC-G200/G200EX and DSC-X300.
• Nikon: Coolpix 700, 880, 900, 950 and 990.

If your camera uses a serial connection, you’ll also have to specify the COM port to which your camera is connected.

For these cameras, there is no automatic detection. Once you have plugged your camera you’ll have to run the downloader manually (by right-clicking the tray icon).

The software has been tested with a Nikon Coolpix 990. NikonView was not installed but the USB drivers (found at the root of NikonView program) were installed. NikonView will run into conflict with cam2pc so you’ll probably have to uninstall NikonView and reboot your computer before using cam2pc to download images from your Coolpix camera. Again I have not tested that extensively so if you do not know what you are doing then follow these recommendations.

Since version 3.0, cam2pc support the following Canon cameras:

• PowerShot A10, PowerShot A20, PowerShot A30, PowerShot A40,
  PowerShot A100
• PowerShot S10, PowerShot S20, PowerShot S30, PowerShot S40
• PowerShot S100, IXY DIGITAL, DIGITAL IXUS
• PowerShot S110, IXY DIGITAL 200, DIGITAL IXUS v
• PowerShot S200, IXY DIGITAL 200a, DIGITAL IXUS v2,
• PowerShot S300, IXY DIGITAL 300, DIGITAL IXUS 300
• PowerShot S330, IXY DIGITAL 300a, DIGITAL IXUS 330,
• PowerShot G1, PowerShot G2
• PowerShot Pro90 IS
• EOS D30, D60

To activate the Canon options you must first download an additional components on cam2pc website. Please check the download section of cam2pc on nabocorp website. Once you have downloaded installed the Canon camera support component the Canon option should be grayed out. Select it, plug your camera in and click the Setup... button. You should see your camera in the dialog box. Select it and click OK.

You can have cam2pc to be automatically launched when you plug your camera in. Go to Start > Setting > Control Panel. Then go to the "Scanners and Cameras" panel. Select your camera and click the properties panel. Go to the Events tab and select the "Camera is detected event". cam2pc should be listed here: select it if this is not the case. If cam2pc is the only application selected then it will be run automatically the next time you plug your camera in. If several applications are selected then a small dialog asking you to choose between the different applications will appear on camera connection (although there seems to be a bug on some systems: if the dialog does pops up and does not contain any application then you'll have to select only one application in the Control Panel. This is NOT a cam2pc bug).

B. A simple download

Now that our camera is configured we will download our first images. Connect your camera and run the downloader if needed (if your camera is detected the downloader should run automatically). The following window appears:

The top of the window sets what we want to do: copy or move files from a location (here a auto-connect device that was assigned the F: letter) to a directory. For you first transfer it is recommended to select a Copy operation to make sure you do not lose your pictures. Once you are familiar with cam2pc you can switch to "Move".

By default, the destination is set to the My Pictures folder. You can change the destination by clicking the folder button on the right and choose an existing folder. Also, you can type in directly the name of a folder in the text field. If you specify a directory that does not exist, it will be created for you automatically.

The source text field is disabled for Sierra-Imaging based cameras and Canon cameras.

Then you can specify if you want to keep the folder hierarchy defined on your memory card. You should leave this to Flatten as most cameras do not support folder creation on the memory card. If you camera does and you care about this then simply switch to “Keep directory structure”.

The last pane indicates what you can do once you have transferred your images:

• Close the download dialog
• Set the read-only attribute on transfered files to avoid unwanted file deletion
• Fix dead and hot pixels (see Dead/hot pixels removal)
• Transform images based on EXIF orientation tag (see Rotate and Flip)
• Browse the transferred images in the Image Browser
• View the transferred images in the full-screen viewer (you can also start the slideshow immediately)
• Open the folder to where the images were transferred in Explorer
• Launch the associated application (of course this does not make sense if you associated image files with cam2pc).

You can select any number of theses actions. They will be executed sequentially: if you choose “Browse” and “Full-screen viewer” then full-screen viewer will not appear until you close the Image Browser.

Once you have set all these options, then simply click the OK button. The image will be copied or moved depending on your choice and the actions you selected will be performed.

Click the Close button to hide the dialog without transferring pictures or at the end of a transfer if you did not select the "Close this window" option.

C. Automatic download

You can setup cam2pc so that the download dialog does not appear when you plug your camera but rather to have cam2pc automatically transfer your pictures using the options you used last.

Go to the Miscellaneous section of the Options and select the “auto-download” feature. Also if you know what you are doing and do not want to be prompted when cam2pc is overwriting a file then activate the “Answer YES TO ALL…” option.

Please note that this option only works with USB Auto-connect cameras.

D. Using masks

The real power of cam2pc is to be able to create destination directories for your pictures based on switches.

The benefit of masks is that you start to organize your images as soon as you transfer them to your PC. The available switches allow you to easily format a date in the new name and also have a free text range in it.

For instance, you could use the following mask: [%Y-%m-%d] %P. The advantage of this mask is that your images will be sorted chronologically in Explorer (see the Image Browser screenshot later).

When you transfer your images, %Y will be replaced by the current year on 4 digits, %m by the current month on 2 digits and %d by the current date on 2 digits. %P will be replaced by a text you will be able to enter when you transfer. Of course, each time you transfer new images you will be prompted for a new text for the %P switch. The prompt window looks like:

A thumbnail is displayed so you can quickly identify the pictures you are transferring and set the appropriate description. Unfortunately, most camera makers do not include thumbnails in TIFF images and as these images are very quite big, it would not make sense to transfer the whole image just to display a thumbnail.

Therefore if you transfer pictures on the 23^rd of June 2002 that you shot say in Paris, you will enter “Paris” when prompted and cam2pc will automatically create a new folder called “[2002-06-23] Paris”.

Most of the time, you will not want to use the transfer date to initialize but the date that the pictures were shot. In that case, you can put all the pictures located on your memory card in the same directory whatever the day they were shot by selecting “Initialize date with first picture date”. Of course you will still be prompted for a description if you used the %P switch.

You can also want to group pictures by day of shooting. Select the last option: “Get date for each individual picture”. In that case cam2pc will prompt you for a description for each different day of shooting of your images.

You can click the “OK for remaining” button in the prompt window if you want to use the current date and description for all the remaining images. You can also click the “Recall” to re-use the previous day and description.

For instance suppose you shot pictures in Paris on the 23^rd and 24^th and pictures in London on the 25^th, 26^th and 27^th of June, 2002. Suppose also that you want to put all the Paris images in one folder and all the London pictures in another one. In that case you will enter Paris in the description for the first set of images (23^rd). Then when prompted for the images taken on the 24^th, click “Recall” and then “OK” as we want to use the same folder. Then for the 25^th enter London and here you can click “OK for remaining” as all the remaining images will be put in the same folder. If you used the mask defined above then two folders will be created by cam2pc: “[2002-06-23] Paris” and “[2002-06-25] London”.

And that’s it, your images are automatically organized for you in folders named with understandable descriptions and all you had to do is to provide those descriptions!

All the available switches appear in the above screenshot. The menu of the screenshot was displayed by clicking on the small arrow button. Each switch is described in the menu.

E. Renaming Files

You may also want to rename files as they are transferred. Renaming works the same way as Masks do except you have some more switches.

The additional switches are ones that will be replaced by the original name and/or extension of the image being transferred.

Also you can have cam2pc automatically number your images for you. Use the %n[] switches. The one with the “a” between the brackets specify that the number should be automatically padded by cam2pc. If you transfer 99 images, cam2pc will number them from 01 to 99, if you transfer 100 images, the numbers will range from 001 to 100. The other version allows you to force the padding length to a desired value. If you want to always have 4 digits whatever the number of images transfer, then use %n[4].

If you use numbering, you should leave the “Keep record… to avoid duplicates” enabled especially if you transfer your pictures always to the same directory. In that case cam2pc will record the last number used when it transferred your images. The next time you transfer images to the same directory, cam2pc will use this record to start numbering your images to avoid conflicts. For instance a first transfer could have created files image01.jpg to image04.jpg. The next transfer will automatically start at 5 creating image image05.jpg and following…

If you do not want the numbering to start over with each directory select the "Use a global counter" option. In that case cam2pc will increment the counter for each image wherever it is transfered to. You can change the value assigned to the next transfered image by changing the "Next ID" value. When you do this you should take care to not use an already used number or you may get into filenames conflicts. This option is useful for owners of cameras that are not able to keep the numbering from one session to the other like the Fujifilm S602.

If you use the %P switch, you will be prompted only once for all the images. Entering a description for each individual file could take a long time especially after a 3 week holiday in Europe…

III. Browsing Images

A. The Image Browser

The Image Browser is used to navigate through your folders and display your images.

Notice in the tree (on the left side) how all my images were organized using cam2pc…

The Image Browser is really simple: on the left side appears a tree showing all drives (local and network). For easier access, the tree also shows a shortcut to your "My Documents" and "My Pictures" folders. You can navigate through the directories as you would in Windows Explorer. On the right side is the Image Browser which displays thumbnails for all the images located in a selected folder. Simply click on a folder in the tree and the Image Browser will be updated. You can change the type of files listed in the Image Browser in the options: you may choose between Images only, Images and movies or All files. If you choose All files, then you can double-click on any file to have it run its associated application.

By default, thumbnails of the Image Browser are cached on disk. The first time you visit a folder, cam2pc has to create a thumbnail for every image in that folder. The process is fast but can take some time if there is a lot of images. The next time you visit the folder, cam2pc will use the thumbnails stored in its database and therefore all the thumbnails will appear very fast.

You can change the respective widths of the tree and Image Browser by dragging the vertical bar that separates them. You can also hide the tree in the View menu and have the Image Browser occupy the whole width of the window. In that case you might also want to enable the display of folders in the Image Browser so you can still easily navigate through your folders.

If you right-click on a folder in the tree, a contextual menu will appear offering different choices like creating a sub-directory to that folder, renaming it or deleting it.

You can also force the update of the thumbnails of that particular directory. In that case, cam2pc will simply throw away the thumbnails it already has for the images and create new ones.

The following option in this menu is to launch a recursive slideshow: cam2pc will find all the images in the clicked folder and all its sub-folders and make a slideshow of the found images.

B. Working with your images

You can select images in the Image Browser and perform some actions on them. Clicking on an image will discard any previous selection and select the clicked image. You can also click and drag in the Image Browser to select multiple images at the same time. After having selected an image you can Shift-click another one to have cam2pc select all the images between those two images.

If you hold the Control key when performing one of those operations, cam2pc will not discard the current selection but will instead add the selected images to the selection. You can also press Ctrl+A to select all the images, Shift+D to select all the images shot at the same date as the one currently selected or press Shift+Ctrl+A to select all files (subfolders, images, movies...).

To perform actions in the Image Browser you can use the standard menu, the contextual menu or the keyboard shortcuts listed on the right of each command in the menus.

If you have selected one and only one image you can:

• Rename it
• Get its properties
• View its EXIF metadata (see below)
• Set it as the wallpaper of your desktop

If you have selected one or several images you can:

• Set or clear the read-only attribute
• Delete them
• Rotate or flip them
• Resize them in batch
• Rename them in batch
• Copy or move them to another folder
• Fix dead or hot pixels

If you move the mouse cursor over an image and then leave it over without moving, a small window will appear listing some information on the file (name, file size, creation date, ilage format, image size). You can change the delay after which this information pops up in the Options.

If you right-click on an image, the 3rd line of the contextual menu will display "Edit Image(s)". Select the option: if you have not done it yet, cam2pc will allow you to define an external image editor. You can use any Image Editor you like (Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro...): browse to the installation folder of this package and choose the right program file. Once the Image Editor is defined, it will be launched and set to open all the selected files.

If you right-click on a movie file (.avi, .mpg or .mov), the 3rd line of the contextual menu will display "Play movie". Select this option to have cam2pc play the movie in a mini-viewer directly integrated in the Image Browser. Press the Escape key to stop the playing. If you prefer to view the movie in the normal viewer, simply double-click on it.

C. Copy/Cut/Paste

For a fast copy or move of files you can use cam2pc's internal clipboard. Simply select your pictures and select Edit > Copy if you want to copy the files and Edit > Cut if you want to move them. A little icon will appear in the lower-right corner of those images to indicate that they are in the clipboard. Then use the folder tree to go to the destination folder and simply select Edit > Paste.

D. EXIF metadata

cam2pc is able to display EXIF metadata. EXIF metadata are special tags embedded into images by digital cameras indicating information about the shooting: date and time, resolution, exposure setting, white balance setting, ISO rating…

E. Rotate and Flip

cam2pc supports JPEG lossless transformations. It means that when it needs to rotate a JPEG image, it does not need to decompress the image, rotate it and then recompress it. This would lead to a quality loss and should be avoided.

Some cameras write the orientation of the camera when each photo was shot. To determine this, take a picture with your camera holding it not the normal landscape way. Then transfer your picture and display the EXIF metadata for the picture. Look for the value of the [Orientation] tag. If its value is 1 then your camera does not support this feature. If its value is different is different than 1 then you can use the "Auto-transform" feature that will automatically turn your pictures to the right orientation!

In this case, you can even activate the "Auto-transform" feature at transfer time...

F. Batch resizing

cam2pc allows you to resize images in batch. This comes very handy if you want to publish your images on the web and need to resize them so that people can download them on a standard dial-up connection.

You can resize images in many different ways. One thing you might always want to do is to keep the aspect ratio of your images. So you will either specify a target width or a target height and check the “Keep ratio” option for the other dimension.

For instance you might want that all your pictures are 640 pixel wide so you specify 640 pixels in the Width text field and you check the “Keep ratio” option on the Height line.

The problem in doing this is that landscape images will usually be resized to something like 640x480 as they are wider than tall. But for portrait shots it is the contrary: they are taller than wide and as we keep the aspect ratio they will be resized to 640x968 which is much bigger than what we planed.

In that case you can resize images along the largest dimension. If you specify 640 for the largest dimension, landscape images will be resized to 640x480 and portrait ones to 480x640. The largest dimension is always set to 640 thus all our images do have the same size in surface.

If you do not check “Rename” or “Output to”, your images will be replaced by the resized ones. To avoid that, you can:

• Rename the images by adding a prefix and/or a suffix to the original image (e.g. rename image01.jpg to image01_small.jpg)
• Output the resized images to a different directory. Click on the folder button to browse your computer for a destination folder.

Of course, you can rename and output to a different directory at the same time.

Click on the "More >>" button to be able to modify the Resizing method and the output format.

In most cases you should leave the Resizing method to Bilinear. The Fast method will produce bad quality images but will be very fast. If you resize your images to very small thumbnails (less than 100 pixels) then you can switch to Lanczos or Mitchell which will produce higher quality results but are much slower.

The output format is set by default to JPEG at a quality level of 85. This should be okay for most users but you can also output to BMP and TIFF and may also want to change the quality level of JPEG files.

G. Batch renaming

Batch renaming is really simple. You select a bunch of images and then you can rename then by renumbering them. Use # character to represent the padded numbering.

For instance in the “New name” field specify: image##. Choose a number from which to start and choose what to do with the extension. Suppose you have the files Paris.jpg, London.TIF and Madrid.Bmp and you choose the lowercase option for the extension. Then the three files will be respectively renamed to: image01.jpg, image02.tif and image03.bmp.

H. Transfering images

You can copy or move selected images using masks: this option is only enable if you set a Mask for the transfer. In that case cam2pc will behave exactly as if you were transferring files except that the source images will be the one specified in the Image Browser and not the ones on your memory card. cam2pc will prompt for a description if you use the %P switch and create the target folder(s) just as when you transfer files from your memory card.

This option is useful if you want to reorganize pictures that you transfered without using cam2pc...

I. Dead/Hot pixels removal

Dead or Hot pixels are pixels that are defective on a digital camera. The way they affect your images may vary depending on the nature of the defect and the camera itself. For instance, all my pictures do exhibit a small green area next to the upper-left corner of my images:

Fixing this can take a long time: you have to open each picture in an Image Editor, retouch it so restore the image then save it. Also if your images are in the JPEG format, you'll recompress the whole image thus loosing additional information because of the lossy nature of the JPEG algorithm. To avoid this you could always save the image to TIFF or to a 100% quality JPEG but the images will be bigger and eat more of your disk space.

cam2pc has all you need to perfectly fix those images without any of these issues: cam2pc is able to automatically fix your images and then save them to their original format. Moreover, if the image was JPEG then cam2pc is able to only recompress the small part of the image that was retouched leaving all the rest (meaning 99% of your image) completly untouched and not recompressed.

To simply illustrate this here are two images. The first one is the difference between an original image and the retouched one saved as 100% quality JPEG file. A black pixel means that the two images were identical for that particular pixel. Any thing other than black means that the two images were different at that position. The second image is the difference between the original image and the one retouched with cam2pc.

I think those images speak for themselves. Notice the only non-black small area in the cam2pc retouched image in the upper left corner exactly where our green are resides... Also let me list you the file sizes:

• Original: 695 250 bytes
• Manually retouched: 808 731 bytes
• cam2pc retouched: 695 176 bytes

Okay now that you have understood the huge benefit of using cam2pc to remove the dead pixels of your images, let's see how to use it.

The best way to setup cam2pc is to shoot a picture with the lens cap on to get a "black frame". If your camera does not have a lens cap you can hold the lens against a black cloth to get as little light as possible. In both cases you should manually disable the flash. You should take a picture for each resolution that your camera supports. You can even take a picture for each resolution and each compression level that your camera supports. I know this can lead a big number of pictures but you'll have to do this only once and this gives the best results!

Another way to setup cam2pc is to select a set of images of identical resolution. You should select at least 10 different images. This method is easier to use but takes longer to process and can lead to unpredictable results... If it does not work properly this way then you should use the black frame method.

So now that you have your pictures click the Add button in the Dead Pixels dialog. If you use the black frame method then select one of the pictures. If you use the multiple images method then multiple select all the images. Click OK. cam2pc will process the picture(s) and automatically detect the dead pixels in them. Once it has finished, cam2pc tells you the number of dead pixels found and asks you to review them. If the number looks unrealistic then press Cancel to discard result. If you are confident in cam2pc then choose not to review the dead pixels.

If you choose to review them you will be presented with the picture you used with the dead pixels highlighted. You can use the Page Up and Page Down keys to toggle the highlithing of the dead pixels. Press Escape when you are finished. cam2pc now asks you if you want to keep those dead pixels or not. You can always manually remove unwanted dead pixels so if you see a small number of unwanted ones then keep those dead pixels: you'll manually edit them later.

If you chose to keep those dead pixels, cam2pc needs to know for which image those dead pixels are valid. The default value is the safer and assumes that you have taken one picture for each resolution at each compression level. If this is not the case the go up in the options. The upper you go the less safe it is...

Repeat the process for each black frame picture or set of images that you have. You can restrict this to the resolutions you use on your camera: if you never shoot in 640x480 then no need to detect the dead pixels for that resolution...

If you want to manually edit the list of dead pixels press the More button and select one of the resolutions in the list box. All the dead pixels found for that particular resolution will be listed and you'll be able to add or delete pixels.

Once this is done, you have to choose how the image should be processed: replace original images, output to another folder, rename... Those options are pretty much self-explanatory.

Once you have setup everything click OK. Select some images that you want to fix in the Image Browser and select Process Dead Pixels. cam2pc will automatically find the right dead pixels list for each image depending on the resolution and the compression level. In a few seconds all your images will be processed and fixed. If cam2pc does not find any matching dead pixels list for an image, it will leave it untouched.

You can also activate the Dead pixels removal feature while transfering pictures from your camera to your PC. Using this, will make you completly forget about the defect of your camera as all your images will get to your PC already retouched with image quality loss!

J. Thumbnail database

By default, thumbnails are cached in a database in order to speed up browsing. You can disable this behavior (which takes some hard disk space) by going to the Browser tab in the Options dialog.

If you enabled the thumbnail caching then you might want to optimize the database from time to time. When you delete images, thumbnails are not explicitly removed from the database so the space needed for the thumbnail is still occupied on disk but cannot be reused. Running a database optimization will clean up the database and remove all those not-needed-anymore thumbnails.

You can also completely wipe out the database. Of course, if you have not disabled the thumbnail caching then cam2pc will immediately recreate the database file to store new thumbnails. If you delete a database and have not disabled the caching, then cam2pc will ask you if you want to disable it or not.

IV. Full-screen Viewing

A. Basic operation

The full-screen viewer is the best place to display your images.

You get in the full-screen viewer when you double click a thumbnail in the Image Browser or when you select the View Full-Screen option.

If you associated image files with cam2pc then double clicking an image file in Windows Explorer also brings the full-screen viewer.

Once in full-screen mode, you can use the following keys to navigate through the images in your folder:

• Page Up or Space to go to the next image
• Page Down or Backspace to go to the previous image
• Home to go to the first image
• End to go to the last image

If you are displaying the last image of a folder and you press the Next image key, then cam2pc will display the first image of the folder and a little green icon will appear during one second in the upper-right corner of the screen.

For more options, right click anywhere to display a contextual menu with all the options available. You will notice that some commands that were available in the Image Browser are also available here (EXIF metadata, Delete Image…).

To leave the full-screen viewer, simply press the Escape key.

B. Slideshow

To enable the slideshow mode simply press the S key. This will display all your images switching from one image to the next automatically after some delay. During a slideshow, an icon appears in the upper right corner of the screen.

You can change some options by going to the Slideshow tab of the Options dialog. You can change the delay between images, set the random order… You can also pick your favorite MP3 file and have cam2pc play it during the slideshow!

C. Display options

The full-screen viewer supports a numerous set of options. One of the more important is the High Quality scaling which is enabled by default. It makes the viewing of image slightly slower but dramatically improves display quality. Check this sample to get an idea: this image is slightly bigger than my display. To display it full-screen it therefore has to be scaled down a bit. On the left is a crop without the HQ scaling. On the right is the same crop with the HQ option on… See for yourself!

Other options include zooming, automatic fitting to the screen and much more. Zooming is done with the + and – keys. Once you have zoomed to a point where the image is larger than your display then you can move the image with the arrow keys or by dragging the image.

The default options should be okay for most users. If you want to change them you probably know what you are doing… One remark: it is not recommended to enable auto-fitting and enlarge as this will display any image (even very small images) full-screen which could lead to a very poor display.

You can also display file information over the image. There are different levels of information you can display. You can toggle the display by pressing the I (as in 'I am') key. You can change the foreground color and the background mode in the Options dialog. If the color chosen is ot readable for a particular image you can try to cycle thru different colors with the C key.

Lastly, if you want to inspect the color of a particular pixel, select the "Toggle Pixel-Under-Cursor Display" option in the contextual menu. The color of the pixel under the cursor will be displayed in the lower left corner of the screen. Move the cursor over the image to inspect other pixels.

D. Cropping

cam2pc is also able to crop your images. While displaying an image choose the Crop option from the popup menu. The cursor should change indicating that the cropping mode is engaged. Now click and drag around the part of the image that you want to keep. cam2pc will darken the part of the image that will be discarded and indicates the size of the defined crop area. You can edit the crop area by dragging the various handles located around it.

Once you are satisified with the area, right-click and select the Crop option. cam2pc will ask you for a filename to save the cropped image. You can change the file format of the new image. If you select JPEG then you will be asked for the JPEG Quality. Choose 100 for a minimum compression resulting in the best image quality.

When the image you are cropping is a JPEG file, cam2pc is able to do lossless compression. Lossless compression means that the cropped image will not be recompressed resulting in image detail loss. Instead cam2pc will simply extract the compressed information from the original image and rewrite exactly identical in the new file. Therefore, you will not be prompted for the JPEG quality of the new file as there is no recompression happening. To be able to do this, the cropping are must match certain criterias that depend on the original file. If you select Lossless crop in the contextual menu then the area will be adjusted to match those criterias. If you want to check those adjustments before cropping you can select the "Adjust crop area for lossless cropping" in the contextual menu.

V. Wallpapering

cam2pc has the ability to set any image as your desktop wallpaper. This option is available in the Image Browser and in the full-screen viewer.

One other interesting option is the possibility to have cam2pc regularly update your desktop wallpaper with an image randomly picked in a folder.

You can enable this in the Wallpaper tab of the Options dialog. Set the time between two updates (in hour/minute/second), select a folder and enable the recursive option if you want cam2pc to take all the sub-folders into account.

Please note that this option requires the cam2pc tray icon to run permanently on your PC.

VI. Contact

cam2pc home page is http://www.nabocorp.com/cam2pc .

If you need any support with cam2pc, please point your favorite browser to the nabocorp support forums: http://forum.nabocorp.com/.

If you want to support cam2pc development, please consider making a donation thru the paypal system. On the nabocorp homepage (http://www.nabocorp.com/) you will find a clickable button on the right side.

VI. Credits

Sierra Imaging chipset support thanks to the photopc-usb library available at http://www.math.ualberta.ca/imaging/.

EXIF metadata support thanks to the metacam library available at http://www.cheeseplant.org/~daniel/pages/metacam.html.

Thanks to P.J. Naughter for all the Visual C++ components he makes available on his webpage.

Thanks to all the others who wrote stuff they published at http://www.codeproject.com and http://www.codeguru.com that I used...

Thanks to samy and Frag for all the feedback on the software... Thanks to all who donated to support cam2pc especially Curtis.